Re: [patch 0/8] Introducing the "timechart" tool

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org> wrote:

> [note: since this is a visualization tool, and lkml doesn't like 
> html email, it's probably better to read the online version at
> 
> http://blog.fenrus.org/?p=5
> 
> in which I also show screenshots of the tool. The following text 
> is the first part of the online introduction]
> 
> Finding out why your Linux computer performs the way it does has 
> been a hard task. Sure, there is Oprofile, and even ???perf??? in 
> recent kernels. There is LatencyTOP to find out where latencies 
> happen.
> 
> But all of these tools are rather limited when the software stack 
> that has the performance issue is more complex than a single 
> program. The tool that comes closest to being useful is 
> `bootchart???, but that has a rather limited resolution.
> 
> To solve this, I have been working on a new tool, called 
> Timechart, that has the objective to show on a system level what 
> is going on, at various levels of detail. In fact. one of the 
> design ideas behind timechart is that the output should be 
> ???infinitely zoomable???; that is, if you want to know more 
> details about something, you should be able to zoom in to get 
> these details. The rest of this blog post describes some aspects 
> of timechart, using real life examples and screenshots. However, 
> it is really hard to show the power of timechart on such a static 
> page, to get a real feeling of what timechart can show you really 
> ought to try it out yourself.....

Nice! 'perf timechart' is IMO a really intuitive way to visualize 
perf record output.

Text output goes only so far - patterns of scheduling (and patterns 
of bad behavior) are a lot easier to notice in SVGs.

	Ingo